Like many people, Abhisek Sarda likes to have company on his way to work. Every morning, the 30-yearold entrepreneur meets up with his travel companion, Bodoni, and to gether they go to office. While this may sound unexceptional, it is not—Bodoni is Sarda's pet dog.

This lifestyle is possible only because Sarda, who runs two startups, works in Goa's legislative capital Porvorim and not a metro.

Being in a quieter part of Goa has meant no traffic congestions, no cramped office spaces and no compromises to quality of life.

His ventures—Beard Design, a branding and design solutions provider, and PPTSalon, a creator of complex PowerPoint presentations—operate out of an airy, lightfilled bungalow in a leafy neighbourhood and are on track to earn combined revenues of Rs 1.5 crore this fiscal.

Sarda is among a handful of entrepreneurs building young ventures away from typical startup hubs of Bangalore, Delhi and Pune. These founders are instead choosing to set up in places like Goa, Dharamsala, Coimbatore, Guwahati and Kochi.

They are driven by a variety of reasons, ranging from better quality of life to lower costs. But while the cities may be small, the ambitions are not. These entrepreneurs are building scalable technology and web-based ventures that are targeting national and even international clients.

"None of our clients are based in Goa and our location has never been a challenge," says Sarda, a college dropout. Beard Design, launched in 2012, provides branding and design solutions to startups such as design firm Chumbak, mobile advertisement network Vserv and Explaara, which provides technology solutions for events. PPTSalon, founded in 2010, has done projects for large organisations like Pepsi, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson.

"I wanted a better quality of life," says Saurabh Nanda, 30, cofounder of Goa-based Vacation Labs, a cloud-based technology solution for tour operators. Nanda, a former senior executive at Cleartrip, had lived in Mumbai for five years and hated the big-city lifestyle. In 2011, when he decided to start up he camped in Bangalore for a few weeks. But the IIT-Kanpur alumnus realised that while Bangalore might be the startup hub of the country he was just not comfortable there.

Nanda had worked in Goa at Synapse Information Services for a year before his Cleartrip stint and had travelled to the holiday destination often. It also ticked all the right boxes in terms of physical infrastructure, connectivity and low-cost commercial real estate. So he decided to set up Vacation Labs, which has over 30 clients now, in Goa.

"I live five minutes away from work, don't have to deal with rush-hour traffic and my daughter can grow up in a bungalow with a garden, instead of a tiny flat," says Nanda.

For the team at MyPromoVideos, it was the desire to start up in their hometown that made them choose Coimbatore. "This is our area of comfort. If we cannot succeed here, we can't succeed anywhere," says Anilkumar Krishnan, 25, the firm's cofounder.

It has created animated explainer videos for ecommerce firm Flipkart, virtual customer support venture Freshdesk and USbased organising tool provider Workflowy, among others.

But starting up in Coimbatore was not easy. While the company was founded in 2009, the team did freelance projects to earn revenue for the first few years. It was only in 2011 that they hit upon the idea of making short videos explaining products and services of companies.

The video they produced for Freshdesk, their first Indian client, put them on the radar of other startups. MyPromoVideos aims to earn revenue of Rs 1.5 crore this fiscal.

Clients are not worried about the location. "The location MyPromoVideos did not matter to us," says Girish Mathrubootham, founder of Chennai-based Freshdesk. "For one off projects with clear deliverables it does not matter." However, there are operational battles— getting quality talent is one of them.

MyPromoVideos hired inexperienced hands and trained them in animation. But unique locations can help attract talent as well.

"Only one out of my 12 team members is from Dharamsala. We got high-quality talent and each one reached out to us and the location was definitely an attraction," says Ayush Ghai, 30, who runs Mindgrep, a technology and design solutions firm in Dharamsala.

The company is also relaunching its movie recommendation platform, Metataste, in the next few months. The IIT-Kanpur alumnus started the company in Gurgaon in 2010 before deciding to shift to the hill town.

Finding advisors and mentors is the other issue. "These places do not have entrepreneurs who have already built and scaled up tech businesses and who can share their learning," says Vijay Anand, who runs Chennai-based incubator The Startup Centre.